g my knuckles against a wall. It ought to be a _big_
room and opulently furnished. There ought to be pictures in it, so that one
could lie back and contemplate them--a picture of troops going up to the
trenches, and another picture of a bus-queue standing in the rain, and
another picture of a windy day with some snow in it. Then one would really
enjoy one's baths.

And there ought to be rich rugs in it and profound chairs; one would walk
about in bare feet on the rich rugs while the bath was running; and one
would sit in the profound chairs while drying the ears.

The fact is, a bathroom ought to be equipped for comfort, like a
drawing-room, a good, full, velvety room; and as things are it is solely
equipped for singing. In the drawing-room, where we want to sing, we put so
many curtains and carpets and things that most of us can't sing at all; and
then we wonder that there is no music in England. Nothing is more maddening
than to hear several men refusing to join in a simple chorus after dinner,
when you know perfectly well that every one of them has been singing in a
high tenor in his bath before dinner. We all know the reason, but we don't
take the obvious remedy. The only thing to do is to take all the furniture
out of the drawing-room and put it in the bathroom--all except the piano
and a few cane chairs. Then we shouldn't have those terrible noises in the
early morning, and in the evening everybody would be a singer. I suppose
that is what they do in Wales.

But if we cannot make the bathroom what it ought to be, the supreme and
perfect shrine of the supreme moment of the day, the one spot in the house
on which no expense or trouble is spared, we can at least bring the bath
itself up to date. I don't now, as I did, lay much stress on having a bath
with fifteen different taps. I once stayed in a house with a bath like
that. There was a hot tap and a cold tap, and hot sea-water and cold
sea-water, and PLUNGE and SPRAY and SHOWER and WAVE and FLOOD, and one or
two more. To turn on the top tap you had to stand on a step-ladder, and
they were all very highly polished. I was naturally excited by this, and an
hour before it was time to dress for dinner I slunk upstairs and hurried
into the bathroom and locked myself in and turned on all the taps at once.
It was strangely disappointing. The sea-water was mythical. Many of the
taps refused to function at the same time as any other, and the only two
which were really effec